Free recipe costing software - is there any?

Hi I am in the process of writing a business plan to start a cake business. I don't want to put out a bunch of cost up front until I know it is a go. My problem is I am trying to write a business model and need to cost my recipes, I have my baking certificate, but have kind of forgotten some things sice getting it 15 years ago. I am wondering if there is a free download out there for costing recipes. I hear the Cake Boss program is great, but it is $100.Help please

You can easily do it yourself. I think it takes me all of 5 seconds to price a recipe in my head. But you can use a calculator.

Get together the actual price of all ingredients. Start dividing bags of sugar and flour into cups per bag. Same with milk. Then do butter by the pound or quarter pound, eggs divided by 12. Make yourself a master list, right down to tsp in a bottle of vanilla.

Now out to the side of every recipe, list the cost and add it up. On every recipe, I have the cost in the upper right corner on a post-it note... you can change these with price increases.

This will work until you can afford a program, but you may be so good at it you won't need a program.

I have been doing it manually with a calculator, and I know it works fine, it is just time comsuming. I will check out the cake central one. The excel one does it not require you to set up formulas to calculate everything?

The only thing I have to say is that this one is not very user friendly, you can modify it. What I mean is you can add your own ingredients to the list. Plus I live is Canada, so yes we use some imperial, but we are metric, so litres, and grams.

The only thing I have to say is that this one is not very user friendly, you can modify it. What I mean is you can add your own ingredients to the list. Plus I live is Canada, so yes we use some imperial, but we are metric, so litres, and grams.

thanks for trying, anything I have seen you have to pay for.

I looked that one over and wrote up one myself that is easy to add to, and will add up all the amounts you need by units--no matter if they are imperial or metric--you choose the cost per unit, and the quantity and they are multiplied by the form and you get a column with totals that are added up at the bottom as a total recipe cost, and you can then divide that cost by the number of servings for a per serving cost..

I did it with my own list of basic ingredients of things we use in the bakery I work in. I don't have prices for anything because I don't handle that part, but in your own place you have access to that info and can just plug it in. I can send you the spreadsheet if you have excel, or if you don't, you can use http://download.openoffice.org/ to read and use it. Let me know.

You should consider your needs...yes, you can cost manually, it is really about the time and having to do redundant tasks every time you cost. Considering the food price inflation currently in the market, costing needs to be rather regular. There are a scattering of free spreadsheets, but they tend to lack conversion abilities (converting volume to weight, etc.) and a useful history so you can track costs.

That being said, there are programs under 40 bucks which have a lot of great features if you just need to cost, record your recipes, and not have the program run your entire business. I would recommend CostGizmo -- it's 40 bucks, but they are really nice and will usually send you a coupon for 10 off if you just email them. It's a simple yet comprehensive app that gives you all the reports and output you need. It's all a very colorful and lively program, not clinical like a lot of programs. It runs on the Excel engine, though you don't see excel running when it is on.

If you want to go with a free spreadsheet for costing, I suggest googling "menu (or recipe) costing spreadsheet free". That will give you a top level search of several free spreadsheets that you can run in Excel like any normal workbook.